Sometimes I have thoughts which don’t warrant a full post. This is experimenting with a new, occasional, mid-week format, to sit alongside the standard in-depth posts, where I share short (300-500 word) thoughts on three topics: thoughts in brief.
Political lies
Politicians on all sides lie and mislead. So do other politically-adjacent people - commentators, activists, journalists and the like.1
But do those on the right and the left lie in the same way?2
On the right, there seems to be a propensity for lies of boasting or bragging, or overclaiming about things that aren't going to happen or sometimes even have no intention of seriously trying to make happen. For example:
They’re eating the dogs!
Everyone who crosses the Channel will be sent to Rwanda.
We’re going to crackdown on woke.
Let’s build a wall and make Mexico pay for it.
Millions of Turks will move to Britain if we stay in the EU.
If a claim is proven false, then sometimes it will be quietly forgotten or, the classic line comes out, ‘Ah, maybe this specific example isn’t true, but the fact that you believed it shows that something very like it is going on.’
Meanwhile, on the left, there seems to be a propensity to deny things that are happening actually are. For example:
No-one is teaching critical race theory or gender ideology in schools.
Refugees have no access to public funds.
There is no such thing as two tier policing.
Public bodies/companies never discriminate against white men.
EU membership has nothing do to with the ECHR.
Again, if proven false, either the denials are rapidly memory-holed, or else we get arguments of the form, ‘It’s not happening, but if it is happening, it’s good.’
In both cases there are a lot of useful idiots/cheerleaders who endlessly repeat these - but there are also plenty who definitely do know what they are doing who nevertheless say it.
These obviously feed off each other in an unhelpful way. For the left, the fact that the right often overclaims or asserts stuff that didn’t happen makes their own side’s denials more plausible. And for the right, the fact that the left frequently denies things that are later proved to be happening, makes their denials of any specific claim less believable.
There probably aren’t any easy solutions to this, other than being aware it happens.
Internships
Remember the recent row over the Government restricting internships to the ‘working class’?
Amidst the rest of the debate, one interesting titbit emerged: There's a set of people who think of an 8-week paid internship as similar to an open day. And there's another set of people who think of an 8-week paid internship as similar to a job.
And this impacts what they think of schemes like this (also ethnic minority internship schemes, etc).
Of course, there are some purists on both sides. There are some who want affirmative action and quotas for the main job applications and for promotions. There are also some people who don't want any consideration of this stuff at all.
But there are also a bunch of people in the middle who oppose this scheme, because an internship is like a job, but would be happy with targeted open days or campus events to raise awareness for under-represeneted groups. And there are also some people who would oppose affirmative action for the Fast Stream or quotas for senior leadership posts but are fine with this, because it's 'only' an internship.
So who's right? Well, in fairness let's say a paid internship is substantially different from both an open day and a permanent job. So one can at least make an argument on both sides.
But for my money, it's much more like a paid job. That's because it's valuable in its own right (one learns stuff, it can go on a CV, and because it offers a fast-tracked route to the job itself). And so strict anti-discrimination and meritocratic principles should apply.
Finally - and these last two paragraphs are highly speculative - I wonder if more of those who see it as 'like an open day' tend to be those who grew up with connections, whose parents knew people, who could have got work experience and internships easily - so they weren't a big deal.
Whereas more of those who see it as 'like a job' are those - like me - who grew up without connections and who relied on open and meritocratic competition, standardised exams, etc to get on in life. For whom internships were not trivial, getting one would have been a big deal and schemes such as this a non-trivial barrier.
Memetic traps
Why do we find ourselves repeatedly drawn into arguments about certain subjects - such as trans, or Israel vs Palestine - even if we feel we don’t want to?3
It seems there are certain subjects which are both sufficiently complex, sufficiently emotive and sufficiently 'scissor-like' to have smart people on both sides (who've worked out lots of arguments and counter-arguments) to sustain a lot of debate and argument that they function as memetic traps.4
In particular, people who are fairly intelligent, care about things, are committed to evidence/logic5, pedantic and like arguing6 seem particularly prone to this sort of memetic trap.
Once you know any of these subjects well, you end up moving through the debate almost like a dance, or a chess opening, in a way which feels satisfying but is ultimately pretty unproductive.7
But despite knowing that it takes real emotional effort to either step back, or to divert the discussion to an eddy where productive discussion can happen. This is particularly so when stuff affects people you know/is in the news a lot/has real world implications which you feel matter a lot that can be hard.
Sometimes you can beat the trap, by breaking out of the standard moves or by focusing on a limited niche area. 8 The fact that these can happen can persuade you it's worth having the debates sometimes.
But of course, sometimes one has a wider motive for debating, such as arguing publicly to persuade others. But unless that is the case, it's probably worth trying not to get stuck in repeatedly retracing the steps of well known debates, but instead either deliberately finding those productive eddies for discourse - or just not talking about it.9
Though never bloggers.
Obviously, on some things, such as scandals, or whether everything in the country that’s going wrong is their opponents’ fault, they do.
Examples that I've felt were very compelling at various times in my life include include atheism vs Christianity, Israel vs Palestine, grammar schools vs comprehensives, evolution vs creationism, was the British Empire or good or bad, and the trans debate. At other times, while I’ve not necessarily changed my core views, I’ve not felt the need to argue them incessantly.
Even though this is a subject I have absolutely no reason to care about, every time I get near it I can feel the tug of the Arminianism vs Calvinism debate like a giant memetic attractor, and can totally understand why people have argued about it for centuries.
Otherwise they’d just be sharing memes and gifs to pwn the other side.
Guilty!
Not unlike the feeling you get when working through a puzzle that's of a type where you know all the steps of how to complete it and are just seeing the answer come out, only with extra anger and risk of ruining friendships.
For example, I had a good discussion on grammar schools a few years ago where I was persuaded that the better results for the most able did come at a price of worse results for some others, and was able to have a fruitful discussion with a pro-Palestine friend about the pros and cons of the way in which Starmer was going about recognition.
Though I am not claiming this is an aspiration I always live up to.
Yes, your analysis reminds me of an academic who once exclaimed to me that the Israel-Palestine debate would be easier if each side just had a codified look up table, so one just need yell out the shortcode rather than bother with going through the whole performance of a long argument.
I actually think that people who want to restrict internships (or at least weight the scales towards disadvantaged groups) do believe that they are vitally important for entering the career, and also that people of the relevant disadvantaged group are much less likely to have the connections etc that make it easy to get into careers and will therefore be underrepresented / contain talent that would be missed by a normal supposedly meritocratic process (which are usually actually extremely biased towards the class, neurotype etc of the interviewer or process setter).
You have conflated two elements in your argument which I think is what has caused this confusion - 'is the internship important to the person getting it', and 'is the work done in the internship important enough that it needs a maximally competent person in it'.
The more important the internship is for the person getting it - if it's the only way to access the career for them - the more we should do affirmative action about it, both to reduce inequality and to increase the pool of people who can get into the career (as advantaged groups are more likely to have the connections for direct entry).
The reason I accept for not doing general affirmative action is jobs actually do things and you need someone who is actually good at the job - but for internships and lots of entry level jobs, people are expected to be learning and not contributing so much, so it's not essential to get the very best candidate.